Early career stage: Do female and male researchers have equal access to funding?

04.12.2023

Researchers can apply for an Ambizione grant during the first four years after the doctorate. From 2012 to 2022, the SNSF awarded 36 per cent of Ambizione grants to women. Why this difference between women and men?

Women are still underrepresented in the Swiss research landscape. While the percentage of women is relatively high among PhD candidates, it decreases with each step up the career ladder.

It is therefore particularly important to monitor the success of women at early- and mid-career stages to detect potential gender biases. In this analysis we focus on the funding scheme Ambizione. It is targeted towards early-career researchers who wish to conduct an independent research project at a Swiss higher education institution.

We consider all 12 Ambizione calls from 2012 to 2022, including over 4000 Ambizione proposals that have been fully evaluated (see the «Dataset» box for details).

Dataset

Our analysis identified three key findings.

1. Substantial percentage of submissions by women

The percentage of proposals submitted by female applicants was between 30% and 40% in all calls. There are large differences in gender shares between the different research areas, as shown in the chart below: At less than 30%, the share of women is lowest in MINT (Mathematics, Natural and Engineering Sciences), which is not surprising given the underrepresentation of women in these disciplines. In contrast, in SSH (Social Sciences and Humanities), female applicants submitted around 50% of all proposals per call.

The percentage of female applicants has tended to increase slightly in recent years. This can mainly be attributed to a rising percentage of women applying in the Life Sciences (LS). Encouragingly, the percentage of submissions by women in MINT has also tended to increase slightly in recent years.

Percentage of proposals from female applicants over time

2. Similar overall success rates for female and male applicants

The following table shows the success rates – i.e. the percentage of fully evaluated proposals that have been funded – over all 12 calls. The overall success rate was similar for both genders. However, in MINT, female applicants had a higher success rate than male applicants, while male applicants had a higher success rate in SSH.

Success rates of female and male applicants across all 12 calls

Research area SR Women SR Men Difference: SR Women - SR Men
SSH 20.5% 22.3% -1.8%
MINT 24.7% 20.9% 3.8%
LS 21.1% 21.5% -0.4%
Overall 21.8% 21.4% 0.4%

If we look at the success rates per call for each gender as shown in the charts below, we see that these have varied considerably:

Success rates by gender over time, overall and by research area

The overall success rate for female applicants was highest in the November 2017 call. This call is a special case since it was the only call with the PRIMA follow-up option in Ambizione: the PRIMA funding scheme supports mid-career female researchers, who are at a slightly more advanced career stage than Ambizione. In this call, 13 PRIMA proposals that could not be financed from the PRIMA budget were transferred to Ambizione, 10 of these proposals were funded by Ambizione.

Are these differences in success rates over time between female and male applicants just due to random fluctuations? Or is there evidence for a significant difference in chances to obtain funding between female and male applicants? We investigated these questions with statistical models.

3. No gender bias in funding access

Relevant factors other than gender

Apparent gender discrepancies in funding success in some calls may actually not be due to gender itself, but rather due to other applicant characteristics or factors which are related to both gender and funding success – so-called confounding factors. For example, having received previous SNSF funding may be a confounding factor: As shown in the chart below, the proportion of applicants who had a previous SNSF grant was higher among female applicants. And applicants who had a previous SNSF grant are more successful at getting their proposal funded.

The potential confounding factors we controlled for in our statistical models are:

  • Previous SNSF funding (Categories: a) Previously received an SNSF grant, b) was an employee on an SNSF grant but never a grant recipient, c) received no funds from the SNSF)
  • Academic age (i.e. the number of completed years since the PhD degree date) as a proxy for experience in research
  • The institution type of the applicant’s affiliation (Categories: a) Cantonal University, b) ETH Domain, c) University of Applied Sciences or University of Teacher Education, d) other).

The charts below illustrate the distribution of these three confounding factors over all 12 calls.

Distribution of confounding factors

Abbreviations: Cant. Univ. = Cantonal Universities, ETH Dom. = ETH Domain, UAS/UTE = Universities of Applied Sciences and Universities of Teacher Education.

Quantifying funding success by gender

How have the chances of funding success by gender evolved over time? To answer this question, we estimated a statistical model (logistic regression) including the confounding factors mentioned above for each of the three research areas (see the «Statistical methods» box for details).

We found that the observed gender discrepancies are not statistically significant (at the 5% level). Thus women and men, in principle, have equal chances to obtain funding.

The results are illustrated below. A gender odds ratio of 1 corresponds to equal chances for funding success for both genders. An odds ratio above/below 1 indicates higher chances for female/male applicants (see the «Odds, odds ratios and confidence intervals» box in the data story about gender monitoring with confounding factors for definitions).

For example, the gender odds ratio is 1.28 for the period 2021/2022 in SSH: This means that the odds to obtain funding for female applicants were 1.28 times the odds of funding success for male applicants. However, since the 95% confidence interval contains the value 1 for each pair of calls, the observed gender discrepancies with respect to funding success are not statistically significant (at the 5% level).

Gender odds ratios of female vs. male applicants over time

Adjusted gender odds ratios of female vs. male applicants (points), together with 95% confidence intervals (dashed lines) per pair of consecutive calls. An odds ratio larger than 1 corresponds to higher chances to get funding for female applicants. The odds ratio estimates are adjusted for previous SNSF funding, academic age and institution type. The years of the respective call deadlines are indicated on the x axis. «2016/2017» refers to the 2016 February and 2017 January calls, while «2017/2018» refers to the 2017 November and 2018 November calls.

The fact that fewer women (323) than men (577) were awarded Ambizione grants in the last 11 years is mostly due to fewer submissions by female applicants and not due to any significant differences in chances to obtain funding between the genders. Further monitoring for all SNSF funding schemes is important in order to detect potential gender biases in research evaluation in the future.

Data, text and code of this data story are available on Github and archived on Zenodo.
DOI: 10.46446/datastory.gender-monitoring-ambizione